.... And Justice For Al

You're early for dinner so the maitre d' leads you to an empty table in the farthest reaches of the restaurant, gestures to the chair in the corner and tells you, "Al usually likes to sit there." A moment later a waiter hustles out of the kitchen with somebody's entrees, jostles you, apologizes and then does a double take: "Are you with Al?" Then your waitress arrives. "Would you like to see a menu? I know Al has a special diet he has to stick to." As soon as the fanfare fades, the actor ducks into the room. He says hello to Jennifer Jason Leigh, who's dining at the next table--"Jennifa!"--then settles into that chair that he's fond of. You first met Pacino a week ago, and he greets you warmly. In person, the actor, 62, seems rumpled, softly funny, slightly scattered: a favorite uncle with a giant rip in his coat. He tends to wave away praise, though he clearly doesn't mind hearing it. Tell him the obvious--that he and his generation altered the definition of a movie star--and he quibbles: "Dustin blew everything open. He changed it all when he did that early stuff, like 'The Graduate'." Tell him that because of him, Hoffman and Robert De Niro, nobody wants to be a pretty-boy leading man anymore, and he rears up in surprise: "I do!"

Well, why not? He's done everything else. Since he played Michael Corleone in "The Godfather" 30 years ago--and gave what is arguably cinema's greatest portrait ever of the hardening of a heart--Pacino has contributed an astonishing number of performances to the collective consciousness. I know it was you, Fredo. You broke my heart... Att-i-ca! Att-i-ca!... You're out of order! This whole trial is out of order!... Say 'allo to my liddle friend!... Hoo-ah!... and so on. This month he gives a wonderfully raw, ravaged turn in Christopher Nolan's unsettling thriller "Insomnia," playing an L.A. detective who's trying to solve a murder in Alaska, and unraveling all the while because he's got a guilty conscience and, thanks to the 24-hour daylight, he's getting absolutely no sleep (review). Robin Williams, who plays the prime suspect, was struck by how voraciously Pacino dug into a character who looks--and feels--his age. "That was amazing to watch," says Williams. "Is he playing on something that may be a deep fear of his? I don't know. But that's what I found fascinating: the weariness of a guy who's been through so much."

Like Pacino's work in "Donnie Brasco," "Insomnia" reminds you that the actor can play small as rivetingly as he can play big, that he can implode as well explode. This seems especially relevant because one of the movies he's increasingly best known for--among young people in general and rappers in particular--is the operatic drug-lord saga "Scarface," in which he chews every inch of the scenery and is hungry again 20 minutes later. "I watch 'Scarface' about once a month," says Snoop Dogg, who sees the movie as a metaphor for every minority's struggle against the system. "I think any brother watching it can identify with what the main man is going through. And when you throw in Pacino--who hip-hop got mad love for since 'The Godfather'--I mean, you've got to love it. Pacino keeps it hard-core and real gangsta in all his films. I go see them all just for that Pacino flava."

The first time you meet Pacino, the gangsta is on his way uptown for a dentist appointment. It's a Thursday afternoon in Manhattan, and the traffic is brutal. Pacino, whose hair has been chopped and bleached to play Roy Cohn in HBO's adaptation of "Angels in America," stares out the window of the black SUV, and sees a cyclist pedaling perilously by the side of the road. He says he'll never understand how anybody can ride a bike in New York, though come to think of it, he was a bike messenger when he was 16, though come to think of it, he got hit by a bus. "The bus kept going, of course," he says. The SUV finally makes it uptown. "It's taken us an hour to get up here," he says. "A f---ing hour." He peers at his driver. "And it's your fault." The driver smiles. "Yep, because I'm the driver." "But you've got a good excuse," Pacino says. "You can say, 'Al told me to take Third Avenue. He thinks he knows everything. The 'city boy!' "

Pacino grew up in the South Bronx. His father, a stonemason named Salvatore, was 18 when the actor was born--and walked out on the family two years later. So Pacino was raised by his mother, Rose, and her parents. He tells you the story in a cafe, having instructed his driver to cancel the dentist--and postpone the dermatologist. (By some weird synchronicity, the cafe is empty except for Liam Neeson, who's also giving an interview.) Pacino is guarded and has spoken in depth to very few journalists over the years. That ends up having an unexpectedly felicitous effect, though: he's not sick of answering questions. When he was a kid, Pacino tells you, all the grown-ups in his house were bilingual. Still, it never really occurred to him that he had a heritage. Then, in elementary school, he was in a play about the Melting Pot. "I looked over at this little brown-haired girl who was stirring the pot with me," he says, "and that's when it hit me: we were representing the Italians."

Pacino's family was always broke. His mother, who was emotionally troubled and whom he was close to, never lived to see him do much more than plays in acting school. "Never saw what happened to me, no," he says. "Nor did my grandfather." You want to draw him out, so you say something along the lines of It would have been nice to buy them a house. "Well, I think I could have done more than that. I think they would have benefited from the monetary stuff even more than I did. I think it would have pulled my mother out of a lot of trouble that she was in. There's a great story... Who wrote it? D. H. Lawrence? 'The Rocking-Horse Winner'? It's the one where the kid gets on the rocking horse and he's able to guess--oh, it's so moving--he's able to guess the winner of the horse race if he rocks really hard. He comes from a poor house. The walls keep saying, 'We need money! We need money!' He finally dies from exhaustion and fever. I somehow identify with that story. I find it very..." He trails off. In Lawrence's story, the boy secretly manages to win a small fortune for his mom, and he dies in a euphoric delirium, saying, "Mother, did I ever tell you? I am lucky." Rose Pacino died of a heart attack when Al Pacino was 22.

Between his 30th and 40th birthdays, Pacino went on a legendary winning streak with the first two "Godfathers," "Serpico," "Dog Day Afternoon" and "... And Justice for All." He did not enjoy the ride. "I thought something was being done to me," he says. "I didn't feel... I sorta felt out of sync with what was happening. I didn't know how to accept it, so I drank and I drugged and I kinda insulated myself. I just came up for air when I worked. Finally my dear friend and mentor Lee Strasberg said to me, 'Darling, you simply have to adjust.' That was so simple and so true, and it helped me a great deal. I wasn't adjusting and to this day I don't know why. I think it was fear of the unknown--of something that was out of my control." Fame? "The whole enchilada."

In the '80s, Pacino made a Colonial drama called "Revolution," and it was such a disappointment he didn't make a movie for four years. He likes to say he took those years off. A source who's known the actor for ages believes there's more to the story: "I think 'Revolution' hurt him emotionally. Shocked him. I mean, the critics hated it. The audiences hated it. And we live in a world where you're as good as your last picture. He didn't 'take four years off.' He was dead, although that's something he'd never admit. He had offers but they were to play gangsters and policemen."

During his sabbatical, Pacino financed a short movie called "The Local Stigmatic," which he'd tinker with for many years but never release. (Pacino has never really stopped being a theater actor in the sense that even the film projects that he's a passionate chatterbox about--like the Shakespeare documentary he directed in 1996, "Looking for Richard"--are about process and not profit.) Now, when he looks back on the late-'80s lull, Pacino says, "I found it relieved me in a lot of ways. Psychologically, it was like getting off a treadmill and not knowing you'd been on it. But then I got..." He laughs. "I sorta got broke." Broke? Come on. "Broke. Pretty much, yeah. With the lifestyle I have--I mean, I could have sold my house, but who wants to do that?" Pacino rebounded in 1989 with "Sea of Love," in which he played... a policeman. He has been threatening to quit the movie business ever since.

A week after your talk in the cafe Pacino invites you to the "Are you with Al?" dinner, and though he's plainly exhausted he's all charm. The actor apologizes for being a little slow-witted. You say, no, no, not at all. You apologize for asking a lot of lame questions. He pats your arm: "You're entitled." Later, you ask him who his friends are. He says, "Well, you'll be my friend. So I've got you."

OK, reality check. When you relate all this adorableness to the source who's known Pacino for ages, he cautions you to remember that Pacino is by definition an actor. In other words, if he can do "The Godfather," he can do dinner. You ask if he thinks Pacino is actually a prima donna. "There isn't an actor who isn't a prima donna. Al's an artist--way up there with Brando. Is he a pussycat? No, he's not a pussycat. He has very, very strong opinions, some right, some wrong."

Fair enough. But Pacino's edges have clearly softened over the years, and not just because he hasn't had a drink in decades. "Before you meet him, you don't know who he is going to be because he is so many different people in your mind," says Christopher Nolan, who directed "Insomnia." "I got the sense that he knows the effect he has on people, and so he is very careful to put you at your ease immediately." Andrew Niccol, who directed Pacino in "Simone," a comedy about a producer due in August, remembers how jittery one actress got around the Great Man. "When she went to the bathroom, Al turned to me, and said, 'Why is she so nervous?' I said, 'Because you're Al f---ing Pacino.' And he said, 'That's right. I am, aren't I?' "

Pacino came by his soft edges--and his sleepiness--personally, not professionally. He and actress Beverly D'Angelo have 16-month-old twins, named Olivia and Anton, so he's been waking up early. Pacino, who has never married, has a policy of not uttering a syllable about his kids or his love life. When you ask to see photographs of his babies--he also has an older daughter, named Julie-Marie, from a previous relationship--he hesitates but pride wins out. "You want to see pictures?" He pulls out two photographs. In each, he holds one of the twins aloft: he looks haggard, yes, but as elated as a boy in a folk tale who's just caught a magic fish. Later, his best friend, Charlie Laughton, will tell you, "He has twins, you know. They've just brightened his life. That's what it is. I mean, he says to me, 'Charl, I'm in love, I'm in love'."

Tonight, in an unguarded moment, Pacino tells you about his older daughter. "She makes little films on the camcorder, you know? She's 12i but she's my kid. The last film was about me. She made it for my birthday. 'Looking for Al.' She did a takeoff on my films. Very clever, I must say." Pacino says he spoke to Julie-Marie just recently. "She's living up in the country," he says, wistfully. "It would be great if she lived down here."

When it's time to order dinner, it turns out that Pacino's dieting for the Roy Cohn role so he subtly suggests you get what he wishes he could eat: meatloaf and mashed potatoes. Later, he encourages you to get dessert. Won't it be torture for him to watch? He smiles. "It'll be a little torture, but I'm ready for it." You ask the waitress to bring you Pacino's favorite dessert, whatever it is. A warm brownie with vanilla ice cream and hot fudge arrives shortly. When you can't finish it, Pacino is visibly disappointed.

The actor chats for a long time. It drifts toward midnight. "I am so f---ing tired," he says, but makes no move to leave. Later, you catch him staring off into space, and ask what he's thinking. "I'm thinking that Beverly is asleep and the twins are asleep," he says. And there's something touching about that: his loved ones are sleeping so the world has stopped and he's got nowhere to be. You ask him if he's happy. "I like what Shakespeare says about happiness," he says, then paraphrases "Hamlet." "I am happy in that I am not over-happy. See, over-happy is like this..." He puts his hands out, palms to the ground, and shakes them. He's finally calm, in other words? "Yeah," he says. "It's a little bit back from happy. On fortune's cap, I am not the very button. Do you get it?" Sort of. "That's OK. We'll go over it again. I have patience." And, for Al Pacino, you've got all night.